JUST a few moments earlier, this had been a breather, a laugher, the kind of game that generates an endless flutter of giddiness in the hearts and the habitats of Mets fans everywhere. All those years of inferiority, all those empty summers when it seemed they were the only ones in their neighborhoods favoring orange and blue over pinstripes? This was the payoff. This was the lottery ticket.

These were the baseball chickens, finally coming home to roost.

It was 8-3, and it felt like it was 18-3, it felt like the Mets could have named their score on a day when they treated the Yankees the way a college football powerhouse treats its homecoming opponent. Tom Glavine had long since vanished into the clubhouse, his 295th career victory all but secure. The rain was falling at Shea. Nobody minded. If the party’s good enough, what’s a little rain?

“Then,” Willie Randolph would say, “it got a little hairy.”

Then Alex Rodriguez, finally reporting for Subway Series duty, made a ball disappear behind the left-field wall. Then Jorge Posada, playing as well as he’s ever played, hitting as well as any Yankees catcher – look it up – has ever hit, made one disappear over the center-field wall. Then Josh Phelps – Josh Phelps? – was stroking a double into the gap.

Now it was 8-6, and Shea sounded the way a movie theater sounds at the end of a slasher flick, when you know Freddy or Jason isn’t really dead, and the tying runs were on base.

Nobody has tortured the Mets, or their fans, more than Jeter across the years, nobody has better represented everything the Mets were lacking, everything they wanted to be. It was Jeter who turned the 2000 World Series irrevocably around with his leadoff home run in Game 4. It was Jeter who first set the baseball agenda for New York City about 15 minutes after showing up 11 years ago, and never stopped.

On this day, the Mets’ own long-sought answer to Jeter, David Wright, already had put a massive footprint on the game, and on the Yankees’ necks, hitting a pair of two-run homers the only two times the Yankees pitched to him, spooking Joe Torre into ordering three intentional walks, treating him like Barry Bonds with a buzz cut. Wright was the one who got the party officially started.

“Against that team,” Wright would say, “it’s never over. Not with that lineup.”

Not with this player. Not with the Captain up, the tying runs on base, and 56,137 voice boxes suddenly stilled. Heilman relished the opportunity, appreciated the challenge to get this out, get the Mets back in the dugout, get the party going again at Shea. No one better represents the Mets’ present mission than Heilman, who surrendered the pennant-winning home run to Yadier Molina precisely seven months earlier.

History tells us some pitchers never recover from pitches like that. And Heilman has struggled some this year. But now he threw a hard, sinking fastball, and Jeter turned over on it, and hit a hard ground ball right into the glove of Wright at third base. The rally would end there. The Mets would add insurance, a good thing on a day when the Billy Wagner Adventure made its first appearance of 2007, in the ninth inning.

It ended 10-7. It ended with Wagner striking out the final two batters after suffering a puzzling brain cramp on a ground ball, and it ended with Mets fans lifting their voices to the black night sky, scattering the rain drops, singing along with Bachman-Turner Overdrive, takin’ care of business.

“We’re playing well, we’re on a little bit of a roll,” said Glavine, who admitted he stopped watching in the clubhouse when things started to get a little uncomfortable. “It’s good to be a Mets fan now, I guess.”

Best it’s been in a long time. Most years, you can hear the Yankees fans plenty during these Subway Series games in Flushing. Not this time. Not this year. If the rain wasn’t drowning them out, the Mets were. The fans just piled on. And did so gleefully.